I don't know why your copy is slow, but I know how to make it take less time.
I think you are defeating the purpose of rsync, you are creating a new directory every time, which means it needs to copy everything every time.

What I do is do an rsync -rau --delete  from the directory I want to copy to the same place every time
i.e.  rsync -rau --delete  excludedirs fromdir todir
rsync is smart enough to only do copies of files that changed, your command is copying some files that never change or change very few times.
Doing it to the same place makes the sync go much faster.

After the sync, I then do a tar czf output-daily-todaysdate-time.tgz ./directorytosave 

then I do a find  output-daily*  and delete the older ones after so many days

I also use fsarchiver  to make a copy of my system partition (it does copy everything)


On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 4:32 PM Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
On 2022-07-15 08:40, Mark Phillips via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> I am trying to back up the contents of the drives (ie /) to an
> external usb drive using rsync. It is taking a really long time.
> After 26 hours of continuous operation I have only transferred
> 138 GB out of 2+ TB

1G takes about 11.3 minutes?  That's super slow.  1G takes about 30
seconds on a USB2 external disk here.  How is this mounted?
 
> rsync  --no-compress --info=progress2 -avAXEWSlHh --exclude=
> {'/run','/mnt','/swapfile','/boot','/dev','/proc','/sys',
> '/run','/mnt','/media','/lost+found','/swapfile.extended','/tmp'}
> / '/media/mark/Seagate Portable Drive/tsunami-backups-Jul_13_17-39/'
> Any suggestions on how I can speed this up and not lose any data?

You don't need -AX unless you're using ACLs and xattrs, and you
probably aren't.  You probably don't want -W.  -H is IIRC heavyweight
and you probably don't have many (or any) hard links on your
filesystems.  The path to the backup disk looks like an automounter is
involved, that can cause dumb things like being mounted with sync.

First suggestion, just use -av .  Second suggestion, instead of trying
to back up everything, back up only the irreplaceable stuff.  This is
usually /home and /etc , maybe /usr/local .  When rsyncing a lot of
stuff (800G not 2T though), a significant amount of time gets spent
stat()ing every single file and dir on both source and destination.  How
many files are you dealing with?  /home here has 272G and 711889 inodes
according to df -i.  An initial sync would take roughly 136 minutes,
subsequent syncs would take roughly 4 minutes.  That's what I recall
from the last time I used rsync to backup.

While it's written in Golang and therefore suspect, restic (
https://restic.github.io/ ) has an interesting feature that allows you
to retain a varying number of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly
snapshots of whatever it is you want to back up.  The documentation
about how to get to a specific restore point is not great, and the
"mount restore point" functionality horks up directory permissions. 
However, it's quite fast at backing up stuff, and it can use S3 buckets
and some other not-your-computer networky things instead of local disks
as backup destinations.

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